>Second, I have to ask, why would someone think that regular expressions, a tool specifically designed to search strings, would be slower than any other tool? O

>Second, I have to ask, why would someone think that regular expressions, a tool specifically designed to search strings, would be slower than any other tool? Of course it's going to be the fastest! (At least in a language like Python.) Flexibly, search string flexibly. Why you think that we cannot achieve faster search in non flexible fashion?